Cycles of Mourning and Memory: Quilts by Mother and Daughter in Gee’s Bend, Alabama

How does grief express itself? What are the forms of its expressions and the shapes and contours of its creations? How are such expressions of grieving learned in childhood and youth? And how might a closely crafted material object—specifically a handmade, pieced cotton quilt—and its conception, making, and use, as well as its memory, serve the excruciating work of grieving a loved one? Engaged with these core questions, this essay focuses on a quilt made while its maker, Missouri Pettway (1900-1981), was in mourning and newly suffering the loss of her husband. And it also considers the memory of a second quilt made in mourning over two decades later by the couple’s daughter after the death of her own husband, pondering how the work of piecing together a quilt as a way to express love and loss may have been passed from mother to daughter.

In 2000, nearly six decades after her father’s dying and death, Arlonzia Pettway (1923-2008), the first-born daughter of Nathaniel and Missouri Pettway, and the family’s devoted historian, readily recalled the dire and tender circumstances surrounding the creation of a quilt made in 1942 by her grieving mother—and involving her own bereaved assistance—within the small African American farming community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, with this telling testimony:

It was when Daddy died. I was about seventeen, eighteen. He stayed sick about eight months and passed on. Mama say, “I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.” She take his old pants legs and shirttails, take all the clothes he had, just enough to make that quilt, and I helped her tore them up. Bottom of the pants is narrow, top is wide, and she had me to cutting the top part out and to shape them up in even strips.¹

Missouri Pettway (1900-1981), Blocks and strips work clothes quilt. 1942. Cotton, corduroy, and cotton sacking. 7 ½’ × 5 ¾’. Collection of Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

Permission courtesy of Hazel Marks. Photograph by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio.

The way Arlonzia Pettway remembered this delicate time and this decisive act at the turn of the twenty-first century, the moving force behind her mother’s creation of this pieced together quilt was the early death of her husband Nathaniel Pettway (1898-1941) at the age of forty-three following months of sickness and suffering. And in her lasting remembrance of the anguished impetus and inner resolve that prompted this quilt’s initial conception, Arlonzia recalled that her mother’s expressed intentions and purposeful handiwork in making her pieced, or patchwork, quilt—including her choice of quilting materials and design, and her desire for the covering’s creation and use—had been deeply thread with love, loss, and longing. In this way, while grieving her father and in the company of her mother—assisting her in the making of her quilt—Arlonzia Pettway witnessed her mother’s creative activity while newly suffering loss and perhaps experienced how quiltmaking might support the work of grief.

Composed largely out of her farming husband Nathaniel Pettway’s old, worn, work clothes while newly suffering his loss, Missouri Pettway’s handmade quilt both implicitly and explicitly evokes ties between the practice of quiltmaking and the process of grieving. Measuring about seven and a half feet by five and three-quarters feet—a good-sized covering for one—and made of over fifty blocks and strips of cloth cut and torn mainly from Nathaniel Pettway’s former work clothes, Missouri Pettway’s quilt was done by design using a model in her own mind. Created with intention and imagination while in the thick grasp of grief, Missouri Pettway’s quilt served as a tender textile elegy—a pieced cotton dirge—that the newly widowed quiltmaker made to support her grieving self and to sustain the memory of her husband who had recently passed on.

While in mourning...